Complete Works of Emile Zola (249 page)

Then the husband stepped forward. A desire for brutality mottled his complexion, he clenched his fists to strike down the guilty pair. Anger in this small, turbulent man burst forth with the report of fire-arms. He gave a strangled chuckle, and always approaching:

“You were announcing your marriage to her, I suppose?”

Maxime retreated, leaned up against the wall.

“Listen,” he stammered, “it was she….”

He was about to accuse her like a coward, to cast the crime upon her shoulders, to say that she wanted to carry him off, to defend himself with the meekness and the trepidation of a child detected in fault. But his strength failed him, the words expired in his throat. Renée kept her statuesque rigidity, her mute air of defiance. Then Saccard, no doubt to find a weapon, threw a rapid glance around him. And on the corner of the toilet-table, among the combs and nail-brushes, he caught sight of the deed of transfer, whose stamped paper lay yellow on the marble. He looked at the deed, looked at the guilty pair. Then, leaning forward, he saw that the deed was signed. His eyes went from the open inkstand to the pen still wet, lying at the foot of the candle-stick. He remained standing before this signature, reflecting.

The silence seemed to increase, the flames of the candles grew longer, the waltz passed along the hangings with a softer lullaby. Saccard gave an imperceptible shrug of the shoulders. He looked again at his wife and son with a penetrating air, as though to wring from their faces an explanation that he was unable to supply. Then he slowly folded up the deed, placed it in the pocket of his dress-coat. His cheeks had become quite pale.

“You did well to sign it, my dear,” he said, quietly, to his wife….”It’s a hundred thousand francs in your pocket. I will give you the money this evening.”

He almost smiled, and his hands alone still trembled. He took one or two steps, and added:

“It is stifling here. What an idea to come and hatch one of your jokes in this vapour-bath…!”

And addressing Maxime, who had raised his head, surprised at his father’s mollified voice:

“Here, come downstairs, you!” he resumed. “I saw you come up, I came to fetch you to say good-night to M. de Mareuil and his daughter.”

The two men went downstairs, talking together. Renée remained behind alone, standing in the middle of the dressing-room, staring at the gaping well of the little staircase, down which she had just seen the shoulders of the father and the son disappear. She could not take away her eyes from this well. What! they had gone off quietly, amicably! These two men had not smashed one another! She lent an ear, she listened whether some hideous struggle were not causing the bodies to roll down the stairs. Nothing. In the tepid darkness, nothing but a sound of dancing, a long lullaby. She thought she could hear in the distance the marquise’s laugh, M. de Saffré’s clear voice. Then the drama was ended. Her crime, the kisses on the great gray-and-pink bed, the wild nights in the hot-house, all the accursed love that had consumed her for months came to this mean, vulgar ending. Her husband knew all, and did not even strike her. And the silence surrounding her, the silence through which trailed the never-ending waltz, frightened her more than the sound of a murder. She felt afraid of this peacefulness, afraid of this delicate, discreet dressing-room, filled with the fragrance of love.

She saw herself in the tall glass of the wardrobe. She came nearer, surprised at her own sight, forgetting her husband, forgetting Maxime, quite taken up with the strange woman she beheld before her. Madness rose to her brain. Her yellow hair, caught up at the temples and on the neck, seemed to her a nudity, an obscenity. The wrinkle in her forehead deepened to such a degree that it placed a dark bar above her eyes, the thin blue scar of a lash from a whip. Who had marked her like that? Her husband had not raised his hand, surely. And her lips astonished her by their pallor, her short-sighted eyes seemed extinct. How old she looked! She inclined her forehead, and when she saw herself in her tights, in her light gauze blouse, she gazed at herself with lowered eyelashes and sudden blushes. Who had stripped her naked? What was she doing there, bare-breasted, like a prostitute who uncovers herself to her stomach? She no longer knew. She looked at her thighs, rounded out by the tights; at her hips, whose supple lines she followed under the gauze; at her bust broadly discovered; and she was ashamed of herself, and contempt of her flesh filled her with mute anger against those who had left her thus, with mere bangles of gold at her wrists and ankles to cover her skin.

Then endeavouring, with the fixed idea of a brain giving way, to remember what she was there for, quite naked, before that glass, she went back by a sudden bound to her childhood, and she again saw herself at the age of seven in the solemn gloom of the Hôtel Béraud. She recalled a day when Aunt Elisabeth had dressed them, Christine and her, in frocks of grey homespun with little red checks. It was at Christmas-time. How pleased they had been with these two dresses just alike! Their auntie spoiled them, and she went so far as to give them each a coral bracelet and necklace. The sleeves were long, the bodices came up to their chins, and the trinkets showed up on the stuff, and they thought it very pretty. Renée remembered too that her father was there, that he smiled in his sad way. That day she and her sister had walked up and down the children’s room like grown-up people, without playing, so as not to dirty themselves. Then, at the Ladies of the Visitation, her schoolfellows had laughed at her about “her clown’s dress,” which came down to her finger-tips and up over her ears. She had begun to cry during lesson-time. At play-time, so that they should not make fun of her any longer, she had turned up the sleeves and tucked in the neckband of the bodice. And the necklace and bracelet seemed to her to look prettier on the skin of her neck and arm. Was that when she had first begun to strip herself naked?

Her life unrolled before her. She witnessed her long bewilderment, that racket of gold and flesh that had mounted within her, that had first come up to her knees, then to her belly, then to her lips; and now she felt its flood passing over her head, beating on her skull with quick blows. It was like a poisonous sap: it had wearied her limbs, grafted growths of shameful affection on her heart, made sickly and bestial caprices sprout in her brain. This sap had soaked into her feet on the rug of her calash, on other carpets too, on all the silk, on all the velvet upon which she had been walking since her marriage. The footsteps of others must have left behind those poisonous seeds which were now germinating in her blood and being carried along in her veins. She clearly remembered her childhood. When she was little, she had been merely inquisitive. Even later, after that rape which had hurled her into wickedness, she had not wished for all that shame. She would certainly have become better if she had stayed knitting by Aunt Elisabeth’s side. And she heard the even clicking of her aunt’s needles, while she stood looking fixedly in the glass to read the peaceful future that had eluded her. But she saw only her pink thighs, her pink hips, that strange, pink silk woman standing before her, whose skin of fine closely-woven silk seemed made for the loves of dolls and puppets. She had come to that, to be a big doll from whose broken chest there issues a mere squeak of sound. Then, at the thought of the enormities of her life, the blood of her father, that middle-class blood that had always tormented her at critical moments, cried out within her, rebelled. She who had always trembled at the thought of hell, she ought to have spent her life buried in the gloomy austereness of the Hotel Béraud. Who was it, then, that had stripped her naked?

And in the dim blue reflection of the glass she imagined she saw the figures of Saccard and Maxime rise up. Saccard, swarthy, grinning, iron-hued, with his cruel laugh, his skinny legs. The strength of that man’s will! For ten years she had seen him at the forge, amid the sparks of red-hot metal, with scorched flesh, breathless, always striking, lifting hammers twenty times too heavy for his arms, at the risk of crushing himself. She understood him now; he seemed to her to have increased in height by this superhuman effort, by this stupendous rascality, this fixed idea of an immense, immediate fortune. She remembered how he sprang over obstacles, rolling over in the mud, not taking the time to wipe himself, so that he might attain his aim in good time, not even stopping for enjoyment by the wayside, munching his gold pieces while he ran. Then Maxime’s fair-haired comely head appeared behind his father’s rough shoulder: he had his clear harlot smile, his vacant strumpet eyes, which were never lowered, his centre parting, which showed the white of his skull. He laughed at Saccard, he looked down upon him for taking so much trouble to make the money which he, Maxime, spent with such enchanting indolence. He was kept. His long, soft hands bore witness to his vices. His smooth body had the languid attitude of a satiated woman. In all his soft, feeble person, in which vice coursed gently like tepid water, there shone not even a gleam of the curiosity of sin. He was a passive agent. And Renee, as she looked at the two apparitions emerging from the light shade of the mirror, stepped back, saw that Saccard had thrown her like a stake, a speculation, and that Maxime had happened to be there to pick up that louis fallen from the gambler’s pocket. She had always been an asset in her husband’s pocket-book; he urged her on to the toilettes of a night, the lovers of a season; he wrought her in the flames of his forge, using her as a precious metal with which to gild the iron of his hands. And so, little by little, the father had driven her to such a pitch of madness and abandonment as to desire the kisses of the son. If Maxime was the impoverished blood of Saccard, she felt that she herself was the product, the maggot-eaten fruit of those two men, the pit of infamy which they had dug between them, and into which they now both rolled.

She knew now. These were they who had stripped her naked. Saccard had unhooked her bodice, and Maxime had let down her skirt. Then between them they had at last torn off her shift. At present she stood there without a rag, with bracelets of gold, like a slave. They had looked upon her not a moment ago, and they had not said to her: “You are naked.” The son had trembled like a coward, shuddered at the thought of carrying his crime to the end, refused to follow her in her passion. The father instead of killing her, had robbed her; this man chastised people by rifling their pockets: a signature had fallen like a ray of sunshine into the midst of the brutality of his anger, and by way of vengeance he had carried off the signature. Then she had seen their shoulders diving down into the darkness. No blood on the carpet, not a cry, not a moan. They were cowards. They had stripped her naked.

And she recalled how, on a solitary occasion, she had read the future, on that day when, in sight of the murmuring shadows of the Parc Monceau, the thought that her husband would soil her and one day drive her mad had come to her and alarmed her growing desires. Ah! how her poor head hurt her! How she realized now the folly of the illusion which had led her to believe that she lived in a blissful world of divine enjoyment and impunity! She had lived in the land of shame, and she was punished by the desolation of her whole body, by the annihilation of her personality, now in its last agonies. She wept that she had not listened to the loud voices of the trees.

Her nudity irritated her. She turned her head, she looked around her. The dressing-room retained its heavy odour of musk, its warm silence, into which the waltz movements never ceased to penetrate, like the last expiring ripples on a sheet of water. This faint laughter of distant voluptuousness passed over her with intolerable irony. She stopped her ears so as not to hear it. Then she beheld the luxury of the room. She lifted her eyes along the pink tent, up to the silver crown that showed a podgy Cupid preparing his dart; they rested on the furniture, on the marble slab of the dressing-table, heaped up with pots and implements that now meant nothing to her; she went up to the bath still full of stagnant water; with her foot she thrust back the things that trailed down from the white satin of the easy-chairs, Echo’s dress, petticoats, neglected towels. And from all these things voices of shame arose: Echo’s dress reminded her of the mummery she had acquiesced in for the eccentricity of offering herself to Maxime in public; the bath exhaled the scent of her body, the water in which she had soaked herself filled the room with a sick woman’s feverishness; the table with its soap-dishes and cosmetics, the furniture with its bed-life fullness spoke to her rudely of her flesh, of her amours, of all the filth that she longed to forget. She returned to the middle of the room, with crimson face, not knowing where to fly from this alcove perfume, this luxury which bared itself with a harlot’s shamelessness, this pink display. The room was naked as herself; the pink bath, the pink skin of the hangings, the pink marble of the two tables assumed an aspect of life, coiled themselves up, surrounded her with such an orgy of living lusts that she closed her eyes, lowering her forehead, crushed beneath the lace of the walls and ceiling which overwhelmed her.

But in the darkness she again saw the flesh-coloured stain of the dressing-room, and she perceived besides the gray tenderness of the bedroom, the soft gold of the small drawing-room, the hard green of the hot-house, all this accomplice luxury. It was there that her feet had been impregnated with the poisonous sap. She would never have slept with Maxime on a pallet, in a corner of a garret. It would have been too low. Silk had cast a coquettish lustre over her crime. And she dreamt of tearing down this lace, of spitting upon the silk, of kicking her great bed to pieces, of dragging her luxury into some gutter whence it would emerge worn-out and sullied as herself.

When she re-opened her eyes, she approached the mirror, looked at herself again, examined herself closely. It was all over with her. She saw herself dead. Every feature told her that the breaking-down of her brain was nearly accomplished. Maxime, that last perversion of her senses, had finished his work, had exhausted her flesh, unhinged her intellect. No joys remained for her to taste, no hope of reawakening.